Afterburn
by blinkblink
Summary: Every year, Snake makes the rounds. Post MGS1 AU. Nominal Snake/Gray Fox, even more nominal Snake/Mery, Snake/Big Boss.


Every year, Snake makes the rounds. There's no time, no date. It just strikes him sudden and bright as a meteorite sometime around July that he hasn't been in a while. It's not as though he has a schedule to clear these days. So he simply gets in the car and drives until he finds what he's looking for.

(They used to say, in the old days, that FoxHound became family. That by the time a soldier made it up the evolutionary ladder past the invertebrates, he'd know it. Snake, before he was Snake, thought it was a load of feel-good bull. By the time he made it to Snake he knew it was true. FoxHound _was_ a family, a family by necessity and default, because all the senior members had no one else left. Anyone who burned bright enough to make it that far had long ago torched all ties – purposely or not – with their own afterburn.

Snake, with no family, considered himself lucky. Right up until he realised that, by its very nature, FoxHound was bound to burn itself to ashes sooner or later. By the time he did, he was the one holding the lighter.)

Once through the gates, he can never find the way. Pathetic, but true. So he walks slow, cigarette slowly crumbling to dusty cinders as he takes deep drags, and looks carefully. Cemeteries are never busy. They're also the one place he feels no pressure – no eyes on his back, on his ass, on his throat – so he takes his time.

(They used to say anyone who met Big Boss would never be able to let his guard down again. Would never lose the ever-present feeling that someone, somewhere knew everything about them and was watching them every minute of the day, and that there was no one he didn't consider expendable. Somewhere along the line it stopped being Big Boss watching him, and became others, a multitude of nameless, faceless others. But Snake knows where it began, and he knows that even if his commander isn't watching him waiting for him to slip, it's because of him that others are.)

Meryl is always the easiest to find. Up in the new patch, where the rows are thinner and visitors more common. He ran into a friend of hers once, young and weedy and still stricken with her death. He was short-tempered and blunt, and hardly waited for Snake to cough out an excuse before telling him to fuck off.

It's funny, it's been years but every visit the earth is new, dirt bare and clumped, dark specks scattered like sand in the grass. Her gravestone is always so perfect, rising sharp and pristine from the manicured lawn. Sometimes there are flowers, ribbons, gifts. He never stays long. There's too much hurt and too little purpose to balance it out. Too much regret, for a life lost due to stupidity and circumstance rather than real conviction, for a betrayal and a failure, for what might have been but never will.

He never leaves anything – it feels like a trespass. She wanted nothing but his respect, and that's something that he can't unequivocally give; it varies with his moods. So he turns his back and walks away. And for a moment every time, he is in the icy hallway leading to the communication tower and his bloody footsteps are crystallising behind him.

Snake tries to remember her as a soldier. He doesn't always succeed.

Gray Fox, conversely but logically, is always the most difficult to track down. Snake sometimes has to spend hours looking. The marker is old, stone split and crumbling slowly away from its original form. Moss has spread over the uneven surface, creeping insidiously over the stone and into the cracks while the roots burrow into it and eat away at all identifying features, destroy the name below.

(They used to say no one in FoxHound had a name, not really. That even the monikers could be changed at a drop of a hat – or a swing in Big Boss's mood – and so there was no point in becoming attached to them. That the whole point behind the hierarchy of titles – apart from keeping the new recruits striving to escape sea louse, slug and cock roach – was to remind the soldiers that names meant nothing and were nothing to be cocky about. That, although even a wolverine, a wolf, a fox, could be dropped with one bullet, even the biggest names – SEALs, MI6, CIA – were just names. Objectively, Snake knows this is true. Subjectively, he doesn't give a damn anymore.)

Snake brings a knife every year, the same one – a rusty old Bowie knife whose sheath is somewhere in the ditches of Zanzibar, which doesn't matter since the edge is too dull to slice C-4, never mind skin – and, kneeling loosely in front of the grave, scrapes the moss off. He does his best to keep from shaving away any more of the stone, from removing any more of the foundation than he has to, but it's not easy. One year he chips off a chunk so big he can barely cup it in both hands, and no amount of balancing can get it to sit back atop the marker. It's the shock of his year when he realises it's tears, not rain, running down his cheeks. He nearly drives the knife into the ground and leaves right there and then, knife returned to its owner. He doesn't, because he's not finished, and even now he can't leave things unfinished any more than he could fail to check the chamber of a newly acquired gun or accidentally set off a claymore.

Still, it's easier with Gray Fox. There's a history to fall back on. There are good times to remember, there is closeness and affection, and the knowledge that for once in his life someone gave something like half a damn about him – the man rather than the uniform.

There is something to be grateful for, and the bittersweet certainty that if he knew Snake was here, Gray Fox wouldn't care, but _would_ give him that careless smirk.

And, at the heart of it, there isn't that raw regret burning like neat whisky and bile. He knows that, however much they hurt each other, they did what they had to. Gray Fox chose his side, his fight, and his opponent, and Snake doesn't have to regret that. He misses the soldier, misses him like cold moonlight on a frozen lake, but it's not the same thing.

Snake tries to remember Gray Fox as a simple friend. He sometimes succeeds.

Snake never finds Big Boss. Big Boss finds him. He doesn't bother wondering about it any more – he'd stopped bothering about it while the man was alive. The soldier just makes his way to a central location, stands, closes his eyes, and when he turns around and there he is.

Physically, the grave isn't overly prepossessing. Nothing fancy in heavy marble or one of those slabs with the fenders. But the stone's got a weight to it, always, a cold strength that seeps out and washes over him. Snake never wants to respect him. Never wants to be the stupid, manipulated tool he always was. And then he gets there, and every year he's a rookie in front of his idol all over again.

(They used to say that the only interaction Big Boss understood was that of owner and weapon, and that he was always the former. That as soon as you were under his command you were his knife, his gun, his tank, and he would fire you off to do what he wanted without worrying what condition you came back in.

Of course, some also said that Big Boss singlehandedly ran the most blood-thirsty, aggressive, traumatised and occasionally psychotic unit in the US Military with an amazing success ratio and enjoyed an unprecedented level of personal loyalty.

Absolutely no one said that maybe, just maybe, the man valued his tools more than most people cared for their families, but the silence was very loud.)

Snake brings a couple of cigars – by this time his cigarette's lying ground-out on some path a ways back – and lights one himself even though he hates the thoughts it pours into his mind like mud, lays the other down in front of the tombstone. He uses a new lighter every year, a cheap plastic convenience store model which he picks up on the drive and leaves behind when he goes.

He wanted to _be_ Big Boss once.

He doesn't any more. Hasn't for a long time. Not since the fires of Zanzibar. But he's come to realise that in a painful and convoluted way, Big Boss wanted it too, wanted to make a mirror of himself even while it threatened against everything he was striving for. To forge a copy of himself – why? To carry on the work of an aging man? To provide the world with a new Big Boss in case he was needed again? Simply to fulfil the parental instinct? Snake still doesn't know. He still struggles just to forgive it.

But for the one man he admired above all others, who he looked to like a father before he realised the supreme irony there, every year he smokes the cigar and puts another man's wishes above his own for a few minutes.

(They used to say that FoxHound soldiers had no wishes other than those of their commander, not even to hold on to their own lives.

Not everything they said was true.)

Snake doesn't regret Big Boss's death any more than he does Fox's, and he doesn't miss the man. Big Boss was an expert at taking everything offered and giving back only scars.

And yet, for all that, Snake still thinks that if he had just tried harder, if he had just been there longer, if he had just been _better_, he would have been fighting with Big Boss rather than against him. That he would have had what he had wanted more than anything, to be one of Big Boss's men to the end. That he would still have a family: a friend, a lover, a father.

Snake tries to remember Big Boss as someone he no longer needs. He hardly ever succeeds.

Every year Snake walks back to the car without looking back, knowing that next year it will be exactly the same. Nothing ever changes. They are all the same, every year, locked tight and ageless in his mind. Objectivity changes – places, stones, names – while subjectivity remains perfectly static. The one thing a FoxHound soldier can never have is a family; Snake burned brightest of all, and left nothing – absolutely _nothing_ – in his wake. So one afternoon every year, he finds what his family will never have.

(They used to say no FoxHound soldier would ever have one. That like ghosts, like ninjas, like nemeses, a unit which wasn't supposed to exist could by definition leave no trace of itself behind. That, if the circumstances failed to ensure it, FoxHound itself would step in to see that absolutely nothing remained.

As it turned out, they were right.)


End file.
